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Monday, August 16, 2010

Without Tiger and Phil, PGA creates its own drama on Sunday

To say that the PGA tour is lacking a little excitement right now is an understatement, and the ratings continue to prove that. With Tiger still hunting to find his game and Lefty struggling to stay healthy for 72 holes, the game needs a ‘go to’ guy to fill in into Daddy gets home. With nether of the afore mentioned having an afternoon tee time on Sunday the PGA made due by creating a little drama on their own by calling a 2-stroke penalty on Dustin Johnson on the 18th hole for “grounding his club into a hazard” we could spend a paragraph or two on what that means in English but the long and the short of it is that you simply can’t get a free “lay of the land” with you club, ie; see how firm the bunker is, etc. So a 5 became a 7 and instead of a three player, 3-hole playoff, we had a two. From there Martin Kaymer and Bubba Watson did give us a great sudden death shootout worthy of more notoriety than it received and that’s just my point. You really can’t ask much more from a tournament that we got from the 2010 PGA Championship and it wasn’t good enough to keep the ratings from falling more than double digits. It proves that audiences would still rather watch Tiger, Phil, Ernie, or Vijay than have a new face hoist the trophy at each major. I for one like to know that it’s anyone’s tournament when they tee-off of on Thursday, as it’s a refreshing change from what we’ve seen over the past few years as it only makes news when one of the big two doesn’t win. So, now it seems that the champion is on the canvas and needs to battle to his feet, but to be honest I don’t know if the big cat has it in him to make an Ali-like return to the top. We’ve seen this before with compeer David Duval, Jim Courier in tennis, and even in many individual sports where the player seems to just lose the magic and drop from to upper echelon to obscurity leaving everyone to wonder how it happened. I’m certainly not ready to concede that’s the case with Lefty and Tiger but TW better get a guru swing coach in camp right away and Lefty better hit the meds or Golf may lose all the mo’ it’s been building over the past few years. What do you think about the penalty assest to Johnson? Are we not talking enough about the winners rather than the losers? Would you rather see new faces atop the leader board or the heavyweights doing battle to make history?